Users of word processing software typically generate an original document on their computer and save it to some destination file or folder. Creating and storing documents in this environment is a fairly efficient process, until changes need to be made to a document, or until the document needs to be shared. Changes for a shared document, including such edits as insertion, deletion, or replacement functions, are difficult to synchronize among users.
Conventional document collaboration technologies can be very challenging in terms of tracking changes to an original document, tracking which users did what, which users have what versions, etc. Most known document collaboration systems typically treat a document as a single entity, and this leads to a proliferation of overlapping documents which rapidly start falling out of step with one another.